Discoveries from 2023
My top picks of the year
I’m always slightly confused when major magazines and newspapers publish their ‘best of the year’ lists at the end of November. Hence me putting this out after 2023 has officially finished.
What follows is my pick of excellent things that I encountered in 2023. I’ve almost certainly forgotten lots. Let me know your picks (and disagreements) down in the comments!
Comics
Void Rivals was a surprise Written by Robert ‘Walking Dead’ Kirkman, it’s a fun pulp sci-fi romp following two crashed pilots from opposing warring factions. Lots of intrigue and mystery, not least that the first issue of this creator-owned original series featured an unexpected cameo from Jetfire, a Transformers character. I love the idea of stealth-launching a major new version of an old franchise in this way.
The Cull I read via creator
’s newsletter. Great stuff and I’m going to dig into Black Cloak in January. I don’t really understand how artwork this detailed can be created for an ongoing comic:
Talking of absurdly beautiful art, I finally finished Kieron Gillen’s DIE, having picked up the gigantic collected hardback. Fascinating, clever, exciting, honest, challenging, in all the usual Gilleny ways
Meanwhile, there was some new SAGA from
, with each new issue giving me significant anxiety as it dropped through the letterbox. An incredibly consistently good series, but it’s difficult reading. The difference between SAGA and the nihilism of, say, Game of Thrones, is that while horrible things happen it still retains a warm heart at its core. lo read BKV’s Spectators via his newsletter, which is odd and challenging and very slow paced in its released schedule. It’s very good, but it’s hard to know what to make of it.I caught up on Norm Konyu’s work after seeing him at London Comic Con. Downlands is a remarkable graphic novel with uniquely brilliant art.
Movies & TV
It was hard to remember what I’d seen this year, as it all blurs together after a while.
Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 was a superb end to that trilogy and showed that there’s not so much ‘superhero movie fatigue’ as ‘mediocre superhero movie fatigue’. That there are three movies about a talking racoon that produce so many feels is quite the thing. The acting and VFX on Rocket have always been astonishing, and somewhat overlooked. I sometimes think that they’re so good that people forget they’re watching clever VFX. Which is, of course, how it should be.
Nimona on Netflix was a delight, and a clever adaptation and updating of
’s source material. Highly recommended, whether you’re watching with kids or not.
Barbie was as good as everyone said it was.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was the other film making it quite clear that good superhero movies are still very welcome. Love that they hired a 14 year old for the LEGO sequence:
The Whale was shattering and compelling. Astounding make-up work, too.
Banshees of Inisherin is one of the funniest films I’ve ever seen for about 20 minutes, and then it isn’t. I still haven’t quite got over it, to be honest.
Dungeons & Dragons was superb fun and did a remarkable job of capturing what it’s like to play D&D.
The live action One Piece was a surprise delight. The 11 year old is now obsessed with consuming all versions of One Piece.
Loki returned for season 2 and landed its ending with pinpoint precision. It’s an example of a perfect ending lifting up everything that has come before.
The Owl House wrapped up as well in a largely satisfying manner, even if it all felt a bit rushed and truncated. I always enjoyed spending time in the world with the one-off episodes, rather than the main story. It deserves its place alongside Gravity Falls.
Games
It was a stupendously good year for games, and I haven’t even got to most of the 2023 releases.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns was a slight obsession at the beginning of the year. The strategic combat was great fun and the story was engaging, even if the dialogue writing was frequently shonky.
I enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 from the beginning, despite its evident flaws. That the developers went back, ripped everything out and essentially transformed it into a new game, 3 years after release, is quite the thing. It’s right there as a top game of all time for me now, especially with the excellent Phantom Liberty expansion. Seeing Idris Elba and Keanu Reeves as digital avatars in the same story is pretty cool.
Hi-Fi Rush appeared out of nowhere and might be my favourite game of the year. Utter joy from start to finish.
Talking of utter joy, the other game vying for that particular award was Super Mario Wonder. Played through this with the (then-) 10 year old and loved every minute. Controversial, but this is the first Mario game I’ve really enjoyed.
Everything that needs to be said about Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been said, I reckon. I still don’t really like the combat, and the story is so thin that I don’t have much motivation to continue playing it when there’s so much other amazing stuff out there, but it’s a remarkable achievement nonetheless.
I got round to playing Citizen Sleeper, which is pretty much the sort of game I’d love to make if I knew how to make games. Beautiful writing wrapped in simple but effective mechanics. Excited about the sequel, which has some preview material going up on the
newsletter.Sea of Stars is the other contender for my game of the year. Retro without leaning on nostalgia as a crutch, it’s a delightful, wholesome fantasy adventure with fun writing, a compelling story and just the right kind of combat and puzzle challenge.
Return to Monkey Island I finally got to this year, and it didn’t disappoint. A clever sequel to the 90 games, with some utterly genius narrative conceits that I should probably write about in a separate newsletter.
Bread & Fred is a recent discover: a silly indie game about two penguins tied together with rope who are attempting to scale a mountain. It makes no sense but is excellent to play in coop with the boy. Critically, while it’s ridiculously difficult, it also has no interest in wasting your time and has some sensible accessibility tweaks.
Coming in at the end of the year (thanks, Steam Sale!) is Jedi Survivor. I haven’t played much of it yet but so far it’s the best Star Wars thing of the year, and a satisfying return to form after the recent lacklustre live action efforts.
Theatre
Managed to get to a coupe of stage productions in 2023 and they were both superb.
Ocean at the End of the Lane was a stunning adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s story with the best live puppetry I’ve ever seen. To the point that my brain couldn’t compute what was happening at one point. As a huge monster climbed out of the back of the stage and walked on its gigantic spindly legs, I wanted to flee from the theatre. Genuinely jaw-dropping and innovative throughout.
We saw Unexpected Twist with the 10 year old, who declared it ‘the best play ever’. Job done.
Tech
I discovered this year that you can now do basic video editing using Canva. This was a big surprise, as I’d only used Canva for simple image layouts in the past. Professionally I’ve edited on various systems from Adobe Premiere to Da Vinci Resolve, but when it came to producing my Substack for Beginners videos I wanted something that would be simple and fast - and cheap.
Turns out that Canva’s video tools are perfect for editing that kind of video: screen capture with voiceover. Combined with OBS for the screen recording and Audacity for editing the VO, and it’s really quite remarkable what you can do for free these days.
In 2022 I self-published my novel No Adults Allowed. I mostly did this on easy mode, using Reedsy’s online editor to produce the ebook and print version. To be fair, it did a really good job.
I wanted to better understand the process of interior book design, though, and an opportunity presented itself towards the end of the year. I was asked to design the interior and layout the cover for a book that was being produced for the Make A Wish Foundation. Written by a very young author, the idea was to produce a professional version of their work. A little daunting, but also a good excuse to improve my skillset in that area. I used the Affinity Publisher suite and it all came together rather nicely. Can’t wait to apply those new skills to my own projects.
Talking of books - I’m intending to read a lot more in 2024. Nothing really stuck with me in 2023.
This newsletter
Writing this newsletter was a real pleasure in 2023. As well as continuing Triverse I tried some new things, too. After attending a webinar and noticing lots of people in the comments struggling with the fundamentals of how to use Substack (the same toolset I use for this newsletter), I started producing how-to videos. They have proved far more successful than I expected.
Here’s the first one:
I’m intending to expand this out to cover other topics in 2024, such as how to use Scrivener. Should be fun!
This was the year the newsletter reached 3,000 subscribers. This was not something I anticipated happening. A big hello and thank you to all of you for reading.
That big hop around September? That was when I started releasing those how-to videos. I thought I might then see a big drop once the new readers/viewers realised I was primarily a writer of weird science fiction, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. Thanks!
Something I’d really like to do in 2024 is run some more structured courses for people interested in writing serial fiction. These would be more intensive and for paid subscribers only, and I’m still working out what exactly they’d be and how to make sure they would provide lots of value.
An even bigger surprise was getting more paid subscribers. I never anticipated this newsletter (or my writing more generally) being a useful financial exercise. In all my serial writing since 2014 I’ve made about 50p in total. In the last year of writing this newsletter that’s changed quite significantly. Not life changing, but definitely very nice pocket money. There’s a glimmer there of something very exciting - not just for me, but for writers of niche material in general. I’m a long way off the fabled ‘1,000 super fans’ concept, but I can sort of vaguely see it on the horizon.
How about you? What did you particularly enjoy in 2023?
I hope you all had a good New Year’s Eve, and that 2024 turns out to be a good one.
Nimona was such a treat this year
Happy new year! I absolutely loved Citizen Sleeper & it makes sense that you enjoyed it too. It's full of interesting ideas & the story, art, music, it all comes together so well. I would also recommend a brilliant indie game: I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, in which you get to work & live alongside your friends on an alien planet colony. It can be emotionally intense but there are trigger warnings on the website & the story is fascinating, designed to be played through several times to uncover all the secrets.
And I'd be interested in a deep dive in serial writing on Substack! I'm gearing up for the 2nd arc of my low fantasy intrigue story Requiem of the Moth so advice from a "pro" would be very much appreciated.